Science Moves Closer To Producing Invisibility Cloaks

Trending News: We're One Step Closer To A Real Invisibility Cloak

Why Is This Important?

Because maybe Bond’s invisible car wasn’t total BS after all.

Long Story Short

We just took another step in developing an invisibility cloak: English scientists made an object disappear by using a composite material with nano-sized particles that enhance specific properties on the object’s surface.

Long Story

From Klingon spaceships and Harry Potter to arguably the worst Bond film of all time, invisibility cloaks or shields have been one of the most potent ideas in fantasy and science fiction. But it may not be fiction for much longer.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have made an object disappear by using a composite material nano-sized particles that can enhance specific properties on the object’s surface. The researchers, from the university’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, worked with UK industry to demonstrate for the first time a practical cloaking device that essentially allows curved surfaces to appear flat to electromagnetic waves.

Queen Mary University London

The surface, similar to the size of a tennis ball, was coated with a nano-composite medium, which has seven distinct layers where the electric property of each layer varies depending on the position. The effect is to 'cloak' the object: such a structure can hide an object that would ordinarily have caused an electromagnetic wave to scatter.

While it’s a long, long way before we’re able to make anything as large as an Aston Martin invisible to the naked eye, the design approach has a bunch of applications, ranging from microwave to optics for the control of any kind of electromagnetic surface waves.

“The design is based upon transformation optics, a concept behind the idea of the invisibility cloak,” QMUL Professor Yang Hao said in a press release. Yang is a co-author on the research. “Previous research has shown this technique working at one frequency. However, we can demonstrate that it works at a greater range of frequencies, making it more useful for other engineering applications, such as nano-antennas and the aerospace industry.

“Perhaps most importantly, the approach used can be applied to other physical phenomena that are described by wave equations, such as acoustics,” Yang continued. “For this reason, we believe that this work has a great industrial impact.”

In a practical sense, the tech could allow for oddly-shaped antennas or acoustic that work just as effectively as their more traditionally shaped counterparts.